Limitations of the Storytelling Mind

It is widely claimed [1] that humans are a story-telling species. Indeed, other species on Earth invent tools, teach their young, communicate, live in complex societies, and do almost everything else that human beings do, to varying degrees. But it is difficult to imagine that any other species on Earth engages in actual storytelling — the weaving of tales, whether through oral tradition or the writing of fiction. A more humble (or less optimistic) Carl Linnaeus could have called our species Homo narrans.  

I’m not alone in believing that this storytelling propensity goes even further [2,3]. We understand our world intuitively through stories. Any time this intuition fails, we either say “this makes no sense” or apply some cognitive tool, such as mathematics or a scientific method. This is what is meant by the popular meme that even quantum physicists don’t understand quantum mechanics; no one understands the quantum world intuitively because it very obviously does not follow normal human intuition.

Much is made of the limits of science and mathematics as tools for finding and describing truth. The fact that some limits exist is, by now, an uncontroversial truth understood by everyone except the most enthusiastic college students. Some questions (e.g. about morality or philosophical matters) can’t be asked in a scientific manner, let alone investigate and answer.

But what about the limits of our main mode of thought? If we are a story-telling species and rely on stories to structure our cognitive world, the mental structures that permeate our being and colours our every perception and our every attempt to communicate with one another are constrained by the stories we tell. Are there ideas we cannot think, or questions that we cannot ask? How can we know?

Christopher Booker, in The Seven Basic Plots, makes a compelling case that all human stories fit a certain mold. Every story, without exception, concerns a limited set of character archetypes. Even stories that intentionally deviate from or even break the mold are interpreted in relation to the mold by the reader. 

Booker identifies five archetypes, each of which comes in a Light and a Dark version, as well as a number of subtypes. 

• The Father/King/Magician/Wise Old Man

• The Mother/Queen/Witch/Wise Old Woman

• The Alter-Ego/Friend/Rival

• The Other Half/anima or animus

• The Child or companion animal

Let’s use Star Wars: A New Hope to illustrate this. After receiving a mysterious message via R2D2, a kind of companion animal, the heroic protagonist, Luke Skywalker, meets Obi-wan Kenobi, the Light-aspected Wise Old Man, who teaches him about the Force and guides him on his path to destiny as a Jedi Knight. The antagonists are two Dark Lords, a Dark-aspected Wise Old Man — the Emperor — and a Dark Father — the aptly named Darth Vader. Along the way, the innocent and naive Luke meets the worldly Han Solo, who vacillates between the Light-aspected roles of Alter-Ego, Friend, and Rival for the attentions of Princess Leia, the story’s anima figure. Importantly, Leia starts off imprisoned by Darth Vader, the Light anima captured and tortured by the Dark Lord. In the process of freeing her, Obi-wan Kenobi is slain. Here, we see a clear example of the young hero coming into his powers at the moment he joins with his anima, having internalised the guidance of the benevolent father figure. The anima (or animus, in the case of female protagonists) represents the complete soul of the hero, and thus tends to express properties that the hero character lacks in himself. In Star Wars, Luke and his companions are isolated and powerless, with vital knowledge of the Death Star that they cannot act upon. Leia, as the leader of the rebellion, brings this knowledge seed to fruition and grants Luke the power to act on it by putting him in the seat of an X-Wing fighter. 

This was just an abbreviated example to illustrate the idea. Roughly half of Booker’s book is dedicated to exploring how an enormous variety of well-known stories have used these archetypes to play out a handful of basic plots, the “seven gateways to the underworld”. Related ideas about storytelling structures, notably the Hero’s Journey, are also discussed here. The second half is a more general discussion of the mechanics of how the archetypes work to determine the meaning of the story, what happens to stories that “lose the plot” or attempt to break the mold, and, finally, a hundred pages on the topic of why we tell stories, illustrated by a kind of history of story-telling. It is this last volume that prompted the writing of this article.

If we accept the notion that all stories are either directly or, through the interpretation by a reader, tied to a mold wrought of Jungian archetypes, and we also accept that our intuitive understanding of the world is through the telling of stories, then we must conclude that we can only ever understand the world intuitively through the lens of these archetypes. If an event occurs that makes no sense as a story, then at the very least we will not feel like we understand it and we may not even be capable of understanding it. 

So what do we do, in such an event? Rarely, we’ll apply scientific methods to treat the phenomenon, but even then most of us (even the scientists) are interested in presenting or reading a comprehensible summary of the research — traditionally one would read the abstract or parts of the introduction and conclusion of the paper, but lately one might hand the whole job of understanding over to an LLM, which will produce a palatable story version of the difficult science. 

Much more likely, we will simply twist the facts around until there appears an acceptable narrative. 

We live in a world that was not made for human minds. Our physical universe is bewildering in its scale and function. Our social lives depend increasingly on technological wonders that profoundly change the meaning of community and social interaction. The interior of our own minds are largely inaccessible to us, and the greatest wisdom passed down to us by spiritual leaders are either blindingly obvious or nigh impossible to turn into practice, or both. Everywhere we look, if we can open our eyes to how things really are, what we see does not feel like it makes sense. 

So we twist everything around so it makes sense to us, but unfortunately the twisting doesn’t make it so. We’re using a model of the world that maps poorly to the real world. We fool ourselves into thinking we understand things that are alien to our lived reality. So we’re fooled by demagogues and fooled by advertisements, or we’re equally fooled by the grass-roots movements against said demagogues and corporations into believing that we can make a difference. It is a small consolation that the demagogues, corporate executives, and grass-roots activists are human beings, too, and therefore equally fooled.

The brain that tells stories is a brain that evolved in small tribes of hunter-gathering apes. The societies that developed the story-telling tradition were largely local or regional. The wonderful story-telling ability that we have inherited biologically and socially is constrained by biological and social structures that inhibit a rational understanding of much of our world, our place in it, and ourselves.

The behaviour that I have described here is a core part of being human. In the prehistoric past, people told stories to one another to understand things like how the sun traveled across the sky, how to manage the changing seasons, and how to deal with the loss of a loved one. These stories demonstrably worked, because we are the living descendants of those story-tellers. Today, we tell stories about how the printer is moody, how the election was stolen, and how we can save the environment by switching to paper bags. How well are these stories working, I wonder?

To be honest, we still tell stories about the other stuff, too. Our social lives in a family setting are still crucial to our well-being. And the Earth doesn’t actually revolve around the Sun, it’s travelling in a geodesic straight line through a curved space-time continuum. But no, that doesn’t make sense, so the story we tell our children is that the mass of the Sun attracts the planet, which falls towards it, always missing, in a neverending loop. And we all go around and around and around and around…

1. Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K. et al. Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling. Nat Commun 8, 1853 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02036-8

2. Alviani, C. The Science Behind Storytelling. https://medium.com/the-protagonist/the-science-behind-storytelling-51169758b22c

3. Bhalla, J. It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/guest-blog/it-is-in-our-nature-to-need-stories/